Galvachren's History of the Last Migrations of the Pridolow Wandering Villages

“This work, along with several contemporaries, written centuries before Galvachren’s famed collaboration with Landis Ourna, has led native Ishveans into competing theories as to whether Galvachren is an immortal, possibly given the boon of true agelessness by the High Goddess Lamitu; or whether they are merely two different scholars with the same name. For all that Ishveos has far greater awareness of the Known Multiverse than the average world, the moon seems largely unaware of Galvachren’s far-roaming multiversal studies.

Before we look down on them for such naive speculation about the Immortal Scholar, we should embrace humility of our own— we have no more idea where Galvachren comes from nor how old he is. And, indeed, we don’t know if every Galvachren work is written by Galvachren himself— while he does seem to be able to visit multiple universes at once, much like the Seedling Prince, hive minds like the long-destroyed Secondborn slave armies, or a handful of less notable multiversal figures— Galvachren seems utterly tolerant of others imitating or impersonating him, so long as the quality of their scholarship meets his entirely reasonable and achievable standards. Thus, the Galvachren who authored this history might absolutely be a different person than the Immortal Scholar— certainly, there are noteworthy stylistic deviations from Galvachren’s usual style.

None of us are much less naive about Galvachren than the Ishveans, in the end.”

-Open letter from The Wanderer, a minor Named of Anastis, to the scholars of the [Redacted].

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No historian has a list of enemies the Wall has defeated or devoured. How could they even begin to start? No book ever bound could even hold such a list. One might as well attempt to list the gods.

There are countless kingdoms, Divines, Pantheons, and city-states that fought Cambrias’ Wall in the past, and most, even among the mightiest, are only remembered by a handful of historians.

There are a few that are well-remembered not only for the scale of the threat they had presented, but for the fact they still existed, enclosed by the Wall— the Gidrans, Iainlock in his Chapel of Rage, the Growth itself.

The wandering villages of the Pridolow are mentioned nearly so often as those great threats, if in far less detail, even though they had posed almost no threat whatsoever. In nearly every history of the Wall, there is at least a passing mention of the “wandering villages of the plains” that had been enclosed and digested by the Wall. The wandering villages have become part of the Wall’s foundational myth, have become a key piece of set dressing.

The keen student of the Wall’s history can be nothing but well-served by learning about the Pridolow- not only do they provide a clear insight into the context of the vast prairies when the Wall was just a speck upon them, but there is quite possibly no other civilization in the history of Ishveos that both parallels and contrasts the Wall.

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The Pridolow were often referred to as the slowest nomads in the multiverse, and many are the jokes that if they had been only a bit faster, they might have survived.

The structure of Pridolowan civilization can be extrapolated from a four key facts— though it is important not to assume that one knows everything about the Pridolowans from that structure.

Here are those key facts:

First, that Pridolowans only leave their childhood homes when they are married— usually quite young— whereupon the families of the couple or throuple (all known Pridolowan subcultures had extremely strict taboos against marriages of four or more partners) would collaborate to build the new home. While divorce was a possibility within Pridolowan society, it was very rare, as most families were less than eager to build their children multiple homes.

Second, that Pridolowan funeral customs involved their burial beneath the foundations of their homes. And once all members of a marriage, and any unmarried children, were all dead and buried beneath the house, the roof and walls would be carefully disassembled, leaving only the floor, foundation, and any structural support elements.

Third, that more than two thirds of Pridolowans gave rise to place gods when they died— place gods that inhabited the homes their progenitors had lived in.

Fourth and finally, the Pridolowans would not build atop the foundations of the old homes— not while their floors and supports could still be seen at all, not while anyone who still lived remembered the progenitors of the gods living there, not while the grandchildren of anyone who remembered those progenitors still lived.

When these key facts are combined, it resulted in an obvious conclusion— the villages of the Pridolowans drifted across the plains over generations. They writhed like snakes across the plains; twisted and wound their way up and down the banks of rivers, ascended and descended the gentle hills of the plains, flirted with the edges of the deserts of the northeast. Over the course of centuries, they would travel from one side of the prairie to the other and back.

It was common enough, when passing through a Pridolow village or following the decaying ruins in their wake, to find a wide empty scar down the middle, as though some powerful Divinity had erased all the buildings in a straight line. Digging into those scars, though, would inevitably reveal the mostly decayed traces of yet older Pridolow foundations, though still too young to be forgotten and built over entirely by passing villages.

Pridolow villages would cluster and merge near valuable resources or friendly trade partners over generations, merge with other Pridolow villages they ran into, and sometimes even migrate through the villages and cities of other peoples, a process that often led to strange cultural shifts on both sides. It also led to bizarre tensions, as the Pridolow had… very unusual views about land ownership, compared to the views of settled folks or more typical nomads.

Their slow migrations were a strangely organic process, driven purely by the locations new families chose to build their homes. There were no official councils, no long deliberations. The merging of Pridolow villages, or the splitting, were likewise similarly organic processes, driven by the choices of individual families.

There were nuances and variance to this, of course— some tribes of the Pridolow had different customs around divorce, others did have councils for storage buildings and the like. And, of course, there were the often acrimonious splits among tribes of the Pridolow as to when families should be allowed to abandon their homes and build new ones, especially when members were buried beneath them. Some rejected it entirely, others only allowed it in case of natural disaster, others would allow it if there were no corpses beneath the homes, and others yet if there were no place gods residing in the home. A few tribes even mandated moving and rebuilding if the first death in a home didn’t result in a place god for the home.

And that didn’t even touch on the sheer diversity of custom, of religious practice, even of language among the Pridolow. By best estimate, there were at least two dozen Pridolow languages and dialects on the prairie.

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There were costs to the Pridolowan lifestyle, of course. A family that failed to anticipate the whims of the rest of the village might find themselves isolated, a long walk from anyone but abandoned homes and the elderly, bound far away from the village by the gods of dead children living under their floors. Or this isolation might be more deliberate, a sort of slow unspoken shunning. The Pridolowans were no more or less prone to drama and petty cruelties than any other people, after all.

There was also the old joke that no one had stronger legs than a Pridolowan, because Pridolowans regularly had to walk great distances to pray to the gods of their grandparents or great-parents, buried under largely decayed foundations. It wasn’t unknown for a Pridolowan to make a whole-day pilgrimage every month, or even every week, to pray at an old family house.

Sometimes, the unguided choices of new Pridolowan families could lead villages to disaster— though they were a people who respected their elders, that didn’t mean they always listened closely, and at times the young led villages into lands with less suitable soil or no decent places to dig wells.

And the big catastrophes, the great droughts or floods that hit various parts of the vast plains, along with the occasional bluelife outbreak or non-sapient demon incursion, tended to hit the Pridowlans much harder than their more sedentary neighbors— for all that they had lived in their homes for generations, had often seen Pridolow villages travel by multiple times over centuries, they were often far more willing to abandon their homes in time of disaster than the Pridolowans were, even when those homes had far more gods than Pridolowan homes.

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The Pridolowans were aware of the Wall decades before it approached any of their villages. How could they not? They were intimately tied into the trade networks of the plains, often migrating along frequent trade routes. Conversely, trade routes regularly formed along the tails of the villages, making regular stops at the decaying house foundations with their old gods, trading prayer for useful boons.

For that matter, the Pridolow were hardly entirely sedentary. Certainly, many of them never traveled more than a few leagues from their birthplaces in their lives— not something you can say about most nomads— but there were plently of Pridolowan merchants, messengers, and the like.

So news of Cambrias’ Wall spread quickly among the migratory villages— but most of them thought little of it. It was a novel, interesting new city to them, a lifestyle that could be seen as either similar or opposite to their own, but none thought it would progress so far or as quickly as it did— for there was much news worthy of attention in those days. The birth of the Wall was not the birth of history, after all— though the true partisans of the Wall would scoff at that. There are always those who dismiss any history not of their own nation as irrelevant.

On top of that, a great drought had just lifted a few years before, one rarely equaled before or since. A vast re-flowering of civilization was occurring across the prairie, as empty cities were rebuilt, and new villages sprung up on the banks of until recently empty riverbeds.

That drought is seldom brought up in histories of Cambrias’ Wall, at least those written atop the Wall, but it is doubtful they would have grown so quickly, or so far, if the birthplace of the Wall did not lie on several major trade routes supplying the rebuilding of drought-emptied cities.

The Wall’s birth was just another point in a much older history of the prairie— but it was the beginning of the end for the Pridolow.

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The first Pridolow village was absorbed by the Wall fifteen years after it began spreading.

It shouldn’t be surprising that it took as long as it did— the Pridolow were numerous, likely the most numerous people on the plains at the time, but not in comparison to the vast open spaces their communities migrated across. It was entirely possible to cross the plains a dozen times in random directions without ever coming across a living Pridolow— though each crossing would take one over at least a dozen of their village trails, the fossil foundations of their civilization.

And, at first, it wasn’t even seen as so great a catastrophe by the Pridolow whose village was absorbed. An annoyance, certainly— they had to fill out paperwork and pay fees to build homes in new closes, and it was nothing if not annoying to have their choices for new homes more constrained, but in those days, the gates between closes were always open, save when enemies approached. In those days, being a groundling was not the literal prison sentence it later became, after all. It would have been far harder for the Wall to spread so far and quickly that way.

So at worst, the Wall was seen as an annoyance by the Pridolow.

What followed was not a story that was surprising in its themes or rhythms, a story that was only unusual in its particulars. There are a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand stories of slow crises that go the same.

Some folks see the crisis coming, but precious few listen.

The crisis builds slowly at first in the background, and the effects begin to be a problem for some, but they’re easily dismissed as outliers, easily ignored by the bulk of folks.

The crisis grows large enough that a sizable minority have begun to talk about it, but the average person isn’t worried about it- after all, it likely won’t affect them or their children.

The crisis grows larger and larger, until the vast majority of people recognize its dangers, but a large enough minority are in denial, or stand to benefit from the crisis in petty ways, that the response is slowed and confused.

And then it is too late to address the problem.

If the Pridolow had responded when the Wall was still young, they might have come up with a viable answer. It wouldn’t have been a military answer— the Pridolow never had great armies, never had any armies, really. There were only a bare handful of Saints among their number, and an even smaller handful of Divinities across their whole history. They were pastoralists and agriculturalists, whose villages always split apart before growing very large. They were more likely to pay tribute to raiders than to fight back— indeed, in the early days of the Wall, the Pridolow were largely protected by the Gidrans in exchange for tribute and hosting any passing warbands.

So the Wall devoured the Pridolow villages, one by one, then two by two, then ten by ten. By the time it had devoured one twentieth of the plains, being a groundling had gone from a minor inconvenience to an unpleasant fate— though still not so bad as it has grown today.

The Pridolow villages tried to flee, but they were a deeply stubborn, traditional people, who tried to flee in the way they had always done so— one new house at a time, in walking distance of their parents’ homes.

And the Wall simply moved faster, a lethally swift architectural pursuit predator.

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Cambrias’ Wall often punishes some devoured enemies fiercely— but few so disproportionately as the Pridolow. It makes sense that they would punish the Gidrans, the fiercest foe of the Wall’s early and middle expansion— but the Pridolow, who had never been worse than a mild annoyance to any of the cities of the plains before, and were universally seen as mostly harmless?

Some historians argue that it was the strange nomadic nature of the Pridolow that caused them to butt against the rules and regulations of the Wall Guard, and that friction pushed the Wall Guard into cracking down harder and harder over time. Others argue that it was the possibly similar, possibly opposite natures of the Pridolow and the Wall that drove it, that Cambrias’ Priesthood saw them as a philosophical challenge to the Wall. Yet other historians believed that it was a deeply cynical ploy, a deliberate effort to annihilate the way of life of an entire people, to make ideal groundlings, rootless workers for the Wall.

We can’t know the intentions and motives of the Wall’s rulers in those days, though. There are no records of it, they weren’t so foolish as to write down any hidden motives.

We only have their given rationale.

Namely, what Pridolowans did with gods that fell far behind their villages.

They let them starve.

At a certain distance— both physical and generational— it just wasn’t worth it to the Pridolow to make the long treks and pilgrimages across the prairie, following the trail of more and more decayed foundations to pray for godgifts of questionable utility. Some gods lasted longer than others, gods with especially powerful gifts worth trekking back for. Passing merchants and other travelers would often pray to Pridolowan gods alongside roads— but it was seldom enough, in the long-term. A few would be rescued when other Pridolowan villages intersected their trails, but it was usually only a temporary reprieve.

So as you followed the decaying trail of a Pridolowan village back, farther and farther, you would find fewer and fewer gods as the decaying foundations became simple hummocks in the ground, until you would eventually just be alone walking on oddly bumpy ground.

Certainly many Pridolowan gods bemoaned their fate, desperately sought to avoid it, but they seemed, by all account, to be a minority. Most Pridolowan gods simply accepted it as the way of things, even sometimes going so far as to refuse offers of transplantation by non-Pridolowans.

Pridolowans saw it as freedom, in an odd sort of way. It was their tradition, but a tradition meant to keep them free, keep them from being overburdened by the sheer weight of the past. The Pridolow represented, I think, a sort of perverse death urge that many historians must feel at their most overwhelmed— a rejection of the colossal weight of the past, of unchartable millennia beneath our feet, of living in an easier present.

It’s certainly a craving I’ve felt myself, in my darkest moments.

The Cambrian priesthood, though…

Well, whether they truly believed it or not, they called the Pridolowan abandonment of their gods depraved, a monstrosity akin to human sacrifices demanded by the bloodiest gods. They portrayed the Pridolow as genuinely evil, ignoring all aspects of their culture save the systematic abandonment of gods.

There is, I think, a legitimate argument to be made that the Pridolow’s abandonment of their gods was a social ill. I don’t think that anyone really believes that a culture can sustain all of their gods, or should— even the growth-at-all-costs-obsessed Wall abandons a good many useless gods to starvation, and actively condemns the most vile gods to it. Still, the sheer number of abandoned gods left in the wake of the Pridolow, whether they accepted it or not, is a bit disquieting for most Ishveans.

But to use that to fully condemn the Pridolow? To ignore their peaceful lifestyles and openness to strangers? To ignore the apparently vast repertoire of songs their people were said to have? To ignore their immense adaptability over the course of generations? All for a single sin, one hardly free of ambiguity?

In truth, I myself have hardly been able to make up my opinion about this Pridolow custom. The more I learn about the Pridolow, the more I wobble back and forth on the question.

But if there is one thing I am willing to stand my ground on, to abandon the supposed impartiality of the historian for, it is this— the Pridolow did not deserve the sheer cruelties inflicted on them to destroy their culture, did not deserve having their children torn from them for reeducation, did not deserve the ten thousand indignities they suffered.

And they certainly did not deserve the great irony inflicted on them.

Those Pridolow groundlings who resisted the destruction of their culture, despite everything else?

They were starved, deliberately and methodically, by the Wall.

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Not all of the Pridolow were absorbed by the Wall, trapped in the closes.

For all the confusion in the early days, for all of those Pridolow who rejected the danger Cambrias posed to them, Pridolow culture had one great advantage— new couples were always, always permitted to choose the site of their new home.

And so, over time, more and more of the Pridolow began to use that to flee, abandoning those of their people who didn’t see the danger. Villages began to splinter, to move towards the edges of the plains.

Not all of them made it. Most, in fact, failed to escape as Pridolow. The villages were simply too slow compared to the Wall. Quite a few chose to abandon and flee their villages, but this, in the eyes of their people and themselves, was an abandonment of their own selves. They were self-made exiles, no longer Pridolow in any sense that mattered.

I can’t imagine it was anything but a brutal choice for them, but history has little else to say about those exiles.

A few Pridolow villages made it to the edges of the plains, ready to escape, but they faced an existential problem there.

The Pridolow way of life didn’t work off the plains. They didn’t have the cultural skills and knowledge to roam freely through the mountains, swamps, or woods that bordered the grasslands in the way they were used to, so they found themselves faced with a choice nearly so harsh as the exiles.

They would have to change their ways of life to escape.

Some rejected that choice, turned back, chose to brave the Wall’s advance. It was the wrong choice, but many, if not most, made it.

Others tried to escape as they were. It too, was the wrong choice, and there are no Pridolow villages in old sense, traveling across the wider world today. Their adaptability extended only so far, in the end.

A few, though… a few chose to change. A few chose to adapt their ways of life.

Most of those who escaped became much more familiar nomads. Some at sea, living on ships filled with the gods of their ancestors. Some built great wagon trains, replacing their parts slowly enough that their gods might always recognize the wagons.

Others settled down, and found new ways of life. Some slowly assimilated into other ways of life, others found halfway points. A few, though, founded entirely new ways of life.

Far in the north, close to the danger zone at the pole, there is an ever-spiraling Pridolow city— a ring-shaped city, where children always settle in homes clockwise of their parents. Few new homes are built, and the sturdy stone buildings there last for many generations, but they keep up the constant generational movement— which results, amusingly enough, in traffic that is visibly segregated by age, with young folks more likely to be walking counter-clockwise in the mornings to visit parents and clockwise in the afternoons and evenings to go home, and vise versa. The land in the center of the ring is kept nearly empty, with expansion being kept strictly to the outside of the ring. The only thing in the parkland at the center of the city is a model village, an outdoor museum of the old Pridolow ways.

Another group of Pridolow refugees settled on one of the floating isles in the sea, building new homes out of shed scales and other biological detritus of the vast creature they live upon, as well as the fast-growing softwoods that grow on its back. When the isle becomes too crowded with abandoned homes, they fashion them into boats to sail the seas in, taking the gods with them.

I know of at least a half-dozen other such communities, and doubtless there are more unrecorded in the histories, that I could only find by wandering the world and exploring the deep histories of every strange community I come across— and even that would be no guarantee of finding them.

One thing that has held true across all of these communities, however, is that none of them call themselves Pridolow any longer. By Pridolow custom, they have not failed as the self-made exiles did, yet they still cast off their name. Some have forgotten their origin, while others remember and mourn it— but each and every one of them willingly and purposefully abandoned their identity as Pridolow.

I do not understand why.

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There was once a popular saying on the plains— “find me land where the Pridolow have never lived.” It was universally understood to be saying that a request was impossible, that there was no such thing. While not literally true, it said much about the surprising speed at which the Pridolow moved, at how common they once were.

So far as I know, no one has said that phrase in centuries, no one has written it in nearly so long. I have only ever seen it in books so old they are near to dust. So much of the Pridolow are lost to time.

The scattered Pridolowan descendant cultures have a common folk-tale, of a Pridolow village that escaped the Wall through one of the labyrinths that lead to other worlds. What would the Pridolow be, without the gods of Ishveos? What sort of changes might the magic of other worlds bring to them? I cannot begin to guess. No multiversal traveler I have spoken to— and I have spoken to many— have heard of them, and there is no evidence that any village truly escaped in such a manner. But…

Find me land that still where the Pridolow yet live.